Entourage X

SOFTWARE

$299 Upgrade; $499 Suite

The email app you've been waiting for

I live and die by email, and Entourage X is simply the best mailer I've ever used. More than a routine upgrade to Microsoft's Entourage 2001 for the Mac, the X version is a thorough redesign that automagically manages your mail, address book, and calendar. When I look up someone's name in my address book, for example, every message that person has ever sent to me is visible. Likewise, meetings, to-dos, or other events are immediately entered into my calendar without my typing a single letter.

Compare this with the weak-kneed (read: slow, unstable, and butt-ugly) attempts at an OS X mailer from Eudora and PowerMail that are just whisker-thin improvements over Apple's free, bundled, and underpowered Mail.app.

Entourage's user interface is as responsive as a Porsche, moving 3,000 messages (2 gigs of data)from one folder to another at once. At the same time, it's forgiving of misclicks, delivering warnings the moment you're about to do something stupid, like delete a folder of archived mail. The saved custom views are especially nice, allowing you to create virtual folders composed of, say, all the notes you received in the past 48 hours from your workplace domain, no matter where they were filed.

Spam management has never been better. The set-and-forget filter reliably catches most junk mail before it invades my inbox, and learns from its mistakes with a minimum of intervention. Replies to messages are linked with their progenitors, leaving a trail that lets you trace a thread of correspondence.

Every nook of Entourage is so polished and intuitive that it's hard to imagine switching away from it. But if something better comes along, the software easily releases your precious archives. While the app stores files in a proprietary, highly optimized database format, it quickly exports to .mbox, the lingua franca of email apps. And loading your messages is simple, with an import wizard that handles data from nine of the Mac's most popular clients.

Where Entourage fails to delight is in its handling of Internet Messaging Access Protocol, the mail server standard widely used online. It doesn't precipitate any of the mass-deletion disasters that have plagued other efforts at Mac IMAP mailers; however, it still has a tendency to choke on such routine tasks as reading and filing messages.

Entourage promises Palm OS syncing in the future. With this feature in place, it may be the most important app in the OS X universe.

Microsoft: www.microsoft.com/macoffice.

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